On Monday night, as I noted yesterday, someone (or more than one someone) shot five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis. Witnesses to the shooting and others who have been following the protest say that the shots came from a small group of white supremacists who had been hanging around the protest for days. .
We still don’t know who pulled the trigger, but it is growing increasingly clear that most if not all of the small squad of racists at the protest were 4channers associated with the /pol/ and /k/ boards, the first a politics board overrun with racists and conspiracy theories and the second a hangout for weapons enthusiasts.
But a lot has happened since my last post, so here’s a roundup of some of the more significant developments.
The police are holding four men — all white, and all in their twenties — allegedly involved in the shooting.
According to local newspaper, police have arrested 23-year-old Lawrence “Lance” Scarsella III, who is one of the two masked men shown driving to the protests in this video last week. (Here’s what appears to be a video of the arrest.)
Ironically, Black Powder Ranger, as Scarsella is apparently known online, was not the one brandishing the gun. BLM activists say that SaigaMarine, the gun-toting racist driving the car and spouting racist epithets, was the somewhat older Hispanic man arrested and released yesterday because he evidently had an alibi for the night of the shooting.
Two other men — identified as Daniel Thomas Macey and Nathan Gustavsson — turned themselves in to police yesterday. Newsweek reports that the police are also questioning a fourth man, Joseph Backman.
While we still don’t know the details of the shooting, someone — apparently one of the 4chan gang — sent a video to a local radio station that appears to show what happened in the minutes immediately before the shooting, in which a group of BLM protesters confronted the 4channers filming their protest. Unfortunately, the video has no sound
Videos of the racist gang at the protest — there are several making the rounds on YouTube — make it abundantly clear that they are either 4channers or others intimately familiar with 4chan lingo. One of the gang even sports a /k/ patch on his jacket.
Much of their conversation consists of little more than repitition of 4chan memes and coded language (e.g. “cultural enrichment”) that they apparently thought would conceal their racism from the Black Lives Matter crowd. No such luck for them: BLM activists figured out relatively quickly that the small group of masked men talking amongst themselves as they not-so-secretly filmed the crowd were up to no good.
Here’s one of the videos of them at the demonstration:
While the racist gang at the protests is clearly connected to 4chan, it’s not clear if any of its members are connected to broader hate movements or subcultures, from GamerGate to the militia movement.
But they are certainly steeped in racism and in America’s gun culture. Digging through the limited information on the internet about the 4chan contingent at the protests, Raw Story notes that they seem to share “a fascination with guns, video games, the Confederacy and right-wing militia groups.”
The cover photo on Scarcella’s Facebook page, for example, shows what’s known as the Bonnie Blue Confederate flag. One of his Facebook likes is OAF Nation, a veterans’ group so right-wing that it has attacked other veterans’ groups for distributing what it called ” f*ggoty ass yard signs” asking those lighting fireworks to not do so near the homes of veterans with PTSD.
Gustavsson, one of the men who turned himself in, brandishes a rifle in his Facebook profile picture as well.
SaigaMarine — apparently the man arrested and released — also posed for his Facebook profile “armed and donning full military gear, the StarTribune reports. “He describes his occupation simply as ‘Saving the Constitution.'”
I will post more when I know more.
Please email me, or post in the comments below, if you see something.
Not quite sure what these guys have to do with the MRAs and PUAs that are the focus of this site, though. Any evidence that they are in the MRM?
There’s no reason to presume that all of those trends have the same, or even similar, causes.
Extremist ideologies of all types tend to pick up during economic crises. Quite a lot of popular revolutions happen during food shortages. Even the recent ones; the Arab Spring happened when crop failures spiked food prices in Egypt. Not the only cause, of course, but people are a lot more likely to want to overthrow the current government if they don’t have anything to lose. Both communism and fascism had their early twentieth century rises associated with economic strain.
The current rise isn’t confined to the right, though the leftist movements picking up steam are nonviolent. I mean, the second-strongest democratic primary candidate is openly socialist. He’s not calling for murder, but he’s got the same general message of “the current system isn’t working. We should change it drastically and improve [Group A]’s lives at the expense of [Group B], who have unfairly profited off the current system.” This gets the best reception when Group A thinks the current system isn’t working for them. When things are going well, it’s a lot easier to sell “Everything is basically fine for [Group A] and [Group B]. We’ll make some little changes to improve things a bit.” when people agree that everything is basically fine.
I’d like to believe that the leftist movements are peaceful because they’re backed by people who fundamentally agree that all people are equally worthy of respect and no one should be murdered for their politics, but honestly in light of the French and Russian revolutions it’s probably just because they’re winning elections.
Here in the USA, it’s definitely linked to Obama. We just didn’t see this kind of extreme racist stuff in the Bush era, and we certainly had the internet then.
I swear if these cops decide to let them go scott free. These people came in with the intent to harm.
At least when the inevitable escalation of conflict occurs I get front row seats to the madness.
I am glad that those bigots did not kill anyone and that there are suspects in custody. Thank you David for keeping us updated.
4chan isn’t racist. /b/ generally hates /pol/ and /k/.
What’s unfortunate is people can’t tell when they’re being mocked.
What people say is intended to mean 100 things about the person who hears it.
One of the problems that both 4chan and reddit have is thinking that boards like /pol/ work. The reason /pol/ is kept up running is for “containment” where they have this fear that if /pol/ is shut down that the racists will overrun all the other boards. This obviously does not work and the board is starting to breed terrorists.
@Jimmly Russla Let me deal with this in 4chan speak so you may hopefully understand it
>Egg avatar
>Opinion discarded
@NYSE
I was gonna go to /b/ to confirm what you say, but sadly it’s filled with animal torture (the most disgusting shit I’ve ever fucking seen, and I only saw the thumbnails, wouldn’t click the webms – I’m gonna have nightmares about this, really really wish I hadn’t seen this), nude images of women posted without consent, “rekt” threads where people die or get horribly injured (won’t watch these either), creepshots, etc.
I did make it to literally the first page of /b/, where I found a thread that says in the OP: “If NO anon posts ‘N****r’ i’ll post something you might like.”
Followed by five replies that say “n****r”. Yup, not racist at all.
(All stars added by me.)
@dhag85 whats terrifying is that the majority of posters on /b/ are generally teenagers. Its scary to think that people have been raised and influenced by that board growing up.
@justlikeheaven
Pretty much the least offensive thing I see on /b/ other than advice threads is the screenshot of an old /b/ thread where a guy seemingly steals a human skull from the Catacombs of Paris and proceeds to post pictures of the skull with his penis in it. I guess at least there’s no immediate victim?
Yeah, I really do wonder what this does to a person who has grown up watching gore, sexual assault, murder and torture for daily entertainment. It’s just such a hellhole I don’t even know how to react.
@Allen,
Related by principles of intersectionality. Feminism is about social justice for all, at least from my perspective of it.
@Allen
There’s such a huge overlap between white supremacists, neo-Nazis, MRAs, TRPers, MGTOWs that it’s difficult to make the distinction. Wanna ask these guys what they think of feminists? I bet you a $ the answer will be indistinguishable from something Roosh would say or has said.
I don’t disagree that meta-meta-irony is beyond what racists can parse and there’s a lot of shock threads, but the disaster starts when some idiot takes themselves too seriously.
An edgelord will post on /b/ about some heinous thing he plans to do and depending on the direction of the wind at the moment, /b/ will have the cops at his door.
@NYSE
So what? The place is hideously racist. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
@allen IIRC, one of their videos featured them discussing pretending to be “beta male cucks” to blend in with the protesters. Draw your own conclusions.
/pol/ and /k/ can be racist
/b/ is just shitposters
Online and offline are different worlds. Online does not evolve or express like offline does.
Sure, it’s madness, but it’s not self-important crap like offline where everyone tries to deny their vulnerability to current events. Online that vulnerability is embraced. Offline it comes out as racism. Online it’s too ironic for offliners.
Can’t follow that word salad. :/
This is slightly off topic, but on topic for the blog. In Turkey around the fifth of May, but only reported here around the fifth of November,a teenaged boy killed a famous Turkish singer because she “insulted his masculinity”.
Trigger warnings for rape and murder at the link.
@History Nerd
I described part of this 4chan history a couple days back. IIRC in 2008 there was still vigorous resistance/pushback from non racists. Whatever. The point stands, it’s a recruiting platform now.
That distinction should be made more in criticisms. It get lost in the same way debate about jailing Holocaust Deniers in other countries gets lost: it’s not because they (claim) to not believe in the Holocaust. It’s because such activities are known historically to be recruiting platforms for fascists.
Re:Obama certain memes shifted almost over night. Joker Bush changed to Joker Obama. The speed at which this happened was one of the first things that made me suspect many anti-Bush memes attributed to the left, had their origins in the extreme right. Not all, just some, particularly the ones pushing “not left or right, but Libertarian”.
Alan, it would be difficult for these thugs to prove they had no means of escaping the situation, and it’s fair to assume they made no attempt to frighten off their pursuers either. They don’t have a leg to stand on really, although, given the state of things in the US it wouldn’t surprise me if they escaped even less serious charges like Aggravated Discharge of a Firearm.
I can confirm that at least on personal anecdote level that 2008 & Obama’s election made some people’s heads pop in Finland, in a manner that took them to hard right. TBH, they were kind of susceptible for that kind of thing, due to crank magnetism.
This is exactly what I was thinking! THANK YOU!
To use chanspeak for a moment –
Some people are shitlords. Anything is grist for their shitmills. Racism, sexism, classism, et cetera. The Internet has given them an audience for their shit.
The rest of us (numerically superior, but less driven) are NORPs*. We expend most of our energy and attention in living our day to day lives. When we encounter shitlords, they can overwhelm us with their surplus energy. We can overwhelm them with our superior numbers, but it requires cooperative effort.
*Normal, ordinary responsible people.